I gotta have my orange juice.

Edwin Friedman summarizes his leadership principles as follows:

A summary of principles

1. Society

• The characteristics of a chronically anxious family, organization, or society—reactivity, herding, blaming, a quick-fix mentality, lack of well-differentiated leadership—will always be descriptive of a regressed institution.
• When any institution, relationship, or society is imaginatively gridlocked, the underlying causes will always be emotional rather than cerebral.
• All pathogenic (that is, destructive) organisms, forces, and institutions, whether we are considering viruses, malignant, cells, chronically troubling individuals, or totalitarian nations, lack self-regulation and are therefore invasive by nature and cannot be expected to learn from their experience.
• For terrorists to have power, whether in a family or in the family of nations, three conditions must be fulfilled: (1) the absence of well-defined leadership; (2) a hostage situation to which leaders are particularly vulnerable; and (3) an unreasonable faith in reasonableness.
• A major criterion for judging the anxiety level of any society is the loss of its capacity to be playful.
• A society’s culture does not determine its emotional processes; rather, a society’s culture provides the medium through which a society’s emotional processes work their art.
• The basic tension that must constantly be re-balanced in any family, institution, or society is the conflict between the natural forces of togetherness and self-differentiation.

2. Relationships

• It is easier to be the least mature member of a highly mature system than the most mature member of a very immature system.
• Increasing one’s pain threshold for others helps them mature.
• Stress and burnout are relational rather than quantitative, and are due primarily to getting caught in a responsible position for others and their problems.
• In any partnership, the more anxious you are to see that something is done, the less motivated your partner will be to take the lead.
• In any stuck relationship between an overadequate member and an underadequate other (person or organization), the overfunctioner must change before the underfunctioner can change.
• In any relationship anywhere, the partner doing the least amount of thinking about the other is the more attractive one to the other.
• When people differ, the nature of their differences does not determine the extent or the intensity of the differing.

3. Self

• Trauma lies in the self-organizing quality of the system and the response of the organism rather than in the event. In other words, the trauma is in the experience and the response to it, not in the event itself.
• The toxicity of an environment in most cases is proportional to the response of the organism or the institution, rather than to the hostility of the environment.
• What is essential are stamina, resolve, remaining connected, the capacity for self-regulation of reactivity, and having horizons beyond what one can actually see.
• There is no way out of a chronically painful condition except by being willing to go through a temporarily more acutely painful phase.
• People who are cut off from relationship systems, especially their family of origin, do not heal, no matter what their symptom.
• Most of the decisions we make in life turn out to be right or wrong not because we were prescient, but because of the way we function after we make the decision.
• A self is more attractive than a no-self.

4. Leadership

• Mature leadership begins with the leader’s capacity to take responsibility for his or her own emotional being and destiny.
• Clearly defined, non-anxious leadership promotes healthy differentiation throughout a system, while reactive, peace-at-all-costs, anxious leadership does the opposite.
• Differentiation in a leader will inevitably trigger sabotage from the least well-differentiated others in the system.
• Followers cannot rise above the maturity level of their mentors no matter what their mentor’s skill and knowledge-base.
• The unmotivated are notoriously invulnerable to insight.
• Madness cannot be judged from people’s ideas or their values, but rather from (1) the extent to which they interfere in other people’s relationships; (2) the degree to which they will constantly try to will others to change; and (3) their inability to continue a relationship with people who disagree with them.
• People cannot hear you unless they are moving toward you, which means that as long as you are in a pursuing or rescuing position, your message will never catch up, no matter how eloquently or repeatedly you articulate your ideas.
• The children who work through the natural difficulties of growing up with the least amount of difficulty are those whose parents made them least important to their own salvation.

(Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve, 201-203)

Edwin Friedman has his own way of charging parents to keep a close watch on ourselves, to pay attention to the logs in our own eyes:

Everything I have said above [about data addiction and anxiety] holds true for parenting as well. Over the years I found parents so engulfed in data and techniques that I stopped trying to educate them and started trying to free them from this “syndrome.” I developed a presentation entitled “How to Get Your Kid to Drop Out and Save $100,000 in Tuition” (it was $30,000 when I began). I always mention at the very beginning that all the specific “techniques” I am going to offer such as how to escalate conflict, screw up communication, and increase the generation gap will work better if parents will commit themselves to reading all they can about raising children. This, I point out, will help make them more anxious, more inconsistent, less self-confident, and far less the kind of non-anxious, challenging presence that could ultimately cost them a bundle of tuition. The advantages of trying to keep up, I point out, are that they can consistently worry if they are reading the right book, if the real truth has just come out and they do not even know about it, and if there are experts out there who “know” how to do it.

Parenting is no different from any other kind of “managing.” The critical issues in raising children have far less to do with proper technique than with the nature of the parents’ presence and the type of emotional processes they engender. I have, for example, almost never seen a mother who had mature relationship with her own mother have trouble with her daughter. Similarly, I never saw a highly reactive or hypercritical father who was not distant from his own family of origin (and who, thereby, made the members of his new nuclear family too important to him).

Where parents are willing to take responsibility for their own unworked-out relationships either with their own parents or with one another, children rarely develop serious symptoms. Symptoms in a child are most likely to develop in the areas of the parents’ own traumatization where they, therefore, have the least emotional flexibility. (Parents never seem to get the problems they can handle.) And to the extent child-focus enables parents not to have to deal with their own relationships or their own unresolved issues, that projection process will retard if not nullify all techniques and well-meaning efforts to improve the child, including the aid they seek from tutors and counselors.

To expect parents to focus on the emotional process in their own relationships rather than focus on their children requires having counselors (therapists, educators, clergy, and so on) who are willing to do likewise. And it is much easier for everyone to conspire to focus on data and technique instead. The social science construction of reality that would diagnose children instead of family emotional process, and that would allow parents to blame their ethnic background rather than take responsibility for their own responses, furthers the anxiety.

Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve, 112-113